Engines

J-58 Engine Testing in Afterburner at test cell A-1 at Pratt and Whitney’s West Palm Beach facility.

Wandering around looking at engines today and came across this great picture of a jet engine under test running with full afterburner. Looks like things got a little warm, eh? The J-58 first ran in 1958. It was used in the SR-71 Blackbird which first flew in 1964, so this stuff is really old, relatively speaking.
    The only problem with this picture is that it is so small. I'm guessing that printed photos have about 1,000 lines of resolution per inch, so even a 3 x 5 snap shot is going to be about 3,000  pixels tall and 5,000 pixels wide. People take their old photographs and scan them with desk top scanners and we get pictures like this, which are nice enough, but they lose much of the detail. If you are going to scan your photographs, do it with the highest resolution scanner you can get. A large digital image can be easily reduced and will look fine, but a enlarged version of a small image is going to look blurry.

I got here because I was looking at Buick engines. Seems a couple of Buick engines were used to start the engines in the SR-71. Not quite sure how that worked.

A pair of Buick V8 engines in the SR-71 starter cart.